1

I thought that readability suffered when using justification as opposed to a ragged margin; are there any studies that confirm this or otherwise?

posted at 08:48 am on September 7, 2010 by Liam Cromar

2 Bad idea

Clever though this may be, I can’t think why you would want to do it. Force justified text is much less readable than ragged, and causes problems for people with visual difficulties and learning difficulties in terms of comprehension.

Force justified text is used purely for economic reasons, ie fitting as much text in as possible, very important when paper was a very expensive commodity. Stick to ragged text – it’s better all round.

posted at 09:00 am on September 7, 2010 by Mactonex

3

I think this is the case when using standard CSS justification because the browser does not automatically hyphenate text. This introduces undesirable gaps between words. The article discusses adding hyphenation points which eliminate gaps and ensure readability, just as in print.

posted at 09:01 am on September 7, 2010 by ferrai

4 Thanks ALA!

I think it’s brilliant that ALA exists to bring content like this. It’s not the kind of subject that will be brought up regularly on most mainstream web-centric websites.

Working in book publishing, I can see that it’s extremely important to have decent H&J in HTML. More so for eBooks than for web content.

I think traditional publishers are going to be putting a lot of pressure on eBook producers to keep them as close as possible to the printed books, so whether ragged-right or justified is better on the eyes is a moot point. What’s important is that we can provide an eBook experience which matches (and hopefully exceeds) the paper-based experience.

posted at 10:46 am on September 7, 2010 by skilldrick

5 Is this the least factually defensible article eve

As I explained to Richard before this article was published, he did not make the case that Web typography will in any respect be improved by any of the following:

• justification
• hyphenation
• pollution of source text with unnecessary soft hyphens

• reliance of source text on JavaScript libraries just to restore essential functions like copy and paste or find

The indisputable fact remains that hyphenation is taken care of at the last stage of layout or rendering by the layout or rendering engine. Your page-layout program hyphenates for you. Only if the program makes a mistake do you fix it, and even then you have to be vigilant that later edits do not reverse the original need for the fix. In the E-book case, the E-book reader does the hyphenation. Such purely automated hyphenation will be only marginally better than none.

In case this is not clear, no, at no time ever should or must or do humans enter thousands of soft-hyphen characters on the off chance software will use them. Software does the hyphenation; humans fix its errors – ideally humans who know what they’re doing.

There very much is a substitute for H&J and we’re using it right now. It is called unhyphenated flush-left text. Richard may not want to read a printed novel typeset that way, but everyone except him and a couple of other people with not enough knowledge of the topic seem quite happy with its use on real Web sites. The Web, for the umpteenth time, is not print, nor is it hot-metal type.

The proposition that Web authors pollute their source text with soft hyphens, which the article admits irreversibly alters that text and makes certain formerly-easy tasks impossible, is much worse than advocating presentational markup like FONT and CENTER (and BLOCKQUOTE to indent) because at least the latter leaves your copy more or less alone. It is just nuts to then state “The bottom line is that browsers – rightly or wrongly – don’t strip out the soft hyphens automatically on copy.”

Optional returns are as old as WordPerfect 5.1 and are another thing the rendering engine has to handle.

Web pages are not continuously changing their set width. Your width vs. my width may be two different things, as might a cellphone’s and an iPad’s and a 30-inch display’s, but that is not the same as the article’s implied condition of continuously variable column width happening before our very eyes, like a snake undulating on the waves.

The Gutenberg history is as irrelevant as the history of print typography. We are not typesetting for print.

Richard cannot actually prove that “The vast majority of books and magazines are typeset using hyphenation and justification” for the simple reason Richard has not examined “the vast majority” of them.

The article’s use of the U.S. Constitution as “neutral, generic” body copy is actively offensive to foreign nationals.

The article falls prey to an error I associate with American Web developers that “special” characters have to be entered using entities of one form or another. They don’t. Not even soft hyphens do.

The entire concept is completely wrong and this article’s endless contortions make that even more apparent.

What’s next? Instructing us to pollute our text with f-ligatures?

The solution to full-justified text on electronic displays is not to use it.

Is this the least factually defensible article ever to run in A List Apart?

posted at 10:52 am on September 7, 2010 by Joe Clark

6 Thought-Provoking

First may I say that I found your article informative (I didn’t know that anyone had tried to implement hyphenation in HTML before) and timely, because of the dubious decision to use HTML for electronic books, and the generally appalling typography that has resulted from this. I fully support what you are trying to achieve.

However the ‘gotchas’ with find, copy and paste would seem to rule this out for the web without the goodwill of the major browser vendors, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be used for iPhone and iPad ebooks where there may be no need to allow the user to to manipulate the text. I must say I’m thinking of going into that area and will consider it.

A few niggles:
1. The link to the hyphenator example doesn’t work. The correct url is:
http://hyphenator.googlecode.com/svn/tags/Version 2.2.0/WorkingExample.html
2. Hyphenating ‘equal’ as you have done is not good typographic practice – it looks terrible. Throw your hyphenation dictionary away and get a better one. Any reader who does not know about automatic hyphenation will hardly be convinced by this. Leave the US Constitution be, and choose a text that illustrates your case better.
3. It’s easy to make the mistake, but looks bad in an article on typography.
“The soft hyphen is a character in the font with it’s own Unicode designation.” Spot the incorrect apostrophe.
4. And please let your writing justify good typography. I can’t believe that educated people can write “going forward” when they mean “in future”.

posted at 10:59 am on September 7, 2010 by David Leader

7 Wrong! (I think)

I’m not sure the hyphen was introduced into press printing to preserve the overall look of the text. It was introduced to save space & time.

Inserting the characters into the frame and discovering the last word was too long to fit the line just took too much time to undo (or continually counting ahead to avoid it). Adding spacers to fit the printing frame would require more spaces (the typesetter would probably run-out) and also waste more space.

This quickly became standard practice and ‘readability’ only resulted because these days everyone learns to read text in this style, although modern press isn’t following this approach as strictly: This weeks TV guide magazine (What’s On TV) is completely non-hyphenated, today’s Metro newspaper uses a mix. Bulletproof Web Design has a ragged edge AND hyphenation (uh?). The Design Of Everyday Things is ‘properly’ hyphenated. – That’s all I’ve got at my desk…

posted at 11:04 am on September 7, 2010 by Lee Kowalkowski

8

Very interesting article philosophically, but from a pragmatic point of view, I doubt it’s worth it. Yes, it makes text a bit more readable (which is debatable, as you can easily see from the comments) and a bit more beautiful, but with the cost of around 80 extra KB on the page, which is not trivial (ok, it might get down to 50-60 when minified, but still…)

posted at 11:07 am on September 7, 2010 by Lea Verou

9 Confusion

My question is why are we trying to set type standards on the web based off of print principles? Many ideas do translate from print to web, but from what I read justification of text is not one of them. As Liam Cromar and Mactonex say, most advice on the web typography seems to explicitly state that justification of text lowers readability and accessibility. I do not want to attack anyone, but as a beginning student in web design I’d like some clarity in advice on typography. Really appreciate an answer on this one…

posted at 11:14 am on September 7, 2010 by spinfuzz

10 not offensive

The article’s use of the U.S. Constitution as “neutral, generic” body copy is actively offensive to foreign nationals.

Not to this foreign national. You can’t prove that for the simple reason that you haven’t asked “foreign nationals”.

posted at 11:57 am on September 7, 2010 by jmtd